Hi I'm Jenny Rae, the Managing Director of Management Consulted and I'm here
today to lay out the key steps to developing the ultimate fit prep plan.
Hopefully what you've gotten from our previous videos is that fit interviews
are important - it's essential to prepare, there's a lot to do, and there are some
key ways that you can do it. So what I want to do today is just highlight how
you get from there to a place where you're actually prepared for the
interview. First, I just want to lay out a few reminders about some key
things that you're trying to convey in the fit interview and specifics on how
you convey them. The first is that it's really important to make sure that your
fit interview responses - with the exception of one key question, "Walk me
through your resume," which can be longer - every other one will be 30 seconds to 1
minute. So it's important that you remember, when
you're responding, that you have 30 seconds to a minute to get your point
across. When you're preparing, you need to prepare for this and you need to develop
a sense of timing so that when you're in the interview you can answer
appropriately. The second thing that's really important is that you need to use
summaries and you need to use structure. In fit interviews, summaries are even
better than upfront structure. Upfront structure says: here's what I'm going to
talk about, but in fit interviews you don't want to sound too pre-prepared.
You want to sound natural, like you're having a conversation. There are some
questions that might lend itself to a little bit of structure but for the most
part you're going to use summaries after you've told a story or after you've laid
out a list of examples. You're going to give the consultants a quick recap of
what you just talked about, and that's going to convey both - here I'm making it
easy for you - here are the key things that I talked about - and also, I'm thinking like
a consultant with structure, summaries, or both. Then finally, the final and most
important thing is just to make sure to be yourself. The fit interview is to
assess your comfort and your fit with the firm.
If you're nervous, they're going to tell. If you're not able to be yourself,
they're going to tell. If you're trying to be someone else, they're going to be
able to tell - it's going to sound like you're a robot, and they're not looking
for robots, they're looking for people that they would enjoy having a slice of
pizza with when they're stuck in a snowstorm for six hours in an airport.
So make sure that, as you're going through the process for your fit interview,
you're preparing stories that convey not only how you did something proficiently
but also how you kept people in mind and you're able to tell those stories in the
most natural way. Here's how you go from where you are through the ultimate
fit prep plan to make sure that you're ready for the fit interview. The first
thing is that you want to make sure you're preparing your stories. So, when
you're preparing your stories there are a couple of things to think about.
You want to make sure that you're ready with them during the networking process
because if you wait for just the fit interview itself, a lot of times you've
missed out on some opportunities to give good and vivid illustrations. You
also want to make sure when you're preparing the stories that you write
them out like essays. I can't tell you how many times I've worked with people
who go through bullet points when they're thinking about their stories. Do
you know how long you can talk on one bullet point? It could be longer than 30
seconds or a minute alone, so it doesn't help you pull the whole story together
when you just convey the bullet points. You need to actually write out your
stories and your responses like essay questions. The goal here is not to
memorize them - the goal is to make sure that you're pulling together all
the key pieces that you want to convey. The next thing that's really important
is that you want to practice out loud. You can do this by yourself, but in
general, in my experience, it takes 10 times in responding to one question to
begin to make it sound natural and if you spend that time with somebody else,
they're going to get impatient before you get to 10 times. So, record yourself,
review how long it took you to say something, and if you're brave, watch
yourself - take video of how you did so you can tell if you're being awkward or
if you're being uncertain in any way when you're going through the interview.
Then, once you're ready with a recording process, and when you think you're
ready to test out your answers on live people, then you can go and find practice
partners. Now, it's really important that you find good practice partners, and some
qualities of a great partner is somebody who actually doesn't know you very well.
Family members aren't great practice partners. First of all, they generally are
pretty nice to you, which isn't helpful in the fit preparation process, but
they also know a lot of the context behind your stories - so if you get
somebody who doesn't know you very well and they don't understand something, they're
going to be able to ask you about it. You can make sure that you're telling the
key context as you go. You also want somebody who's very constructive -
they're able to tell you what you can do better and also supportive, so they can
tell you what you're already doing well. And finally, it's great to have people
who go through the process currently or somebody like our team at Management
Consulted who are available to talk to you as you're preparing for the fit
interviews - to give you expert advice. Finally, when you start for the fit
interview preparation is something that's greatly contentious. The
reason that it's greatly contentious is that most people begin to prepare
for the fit interview perhaps the night before the actual interview. Like I said,
I think that the preparation process should start when you're networking,
which is often many months before - but at the very least, you need to make sure
that you are no less than two weeks prior to your fit interview when you
begin to prepare because it takes quite a lot of time to go through, write out
your stories, practice them 10 times, record yourself, and then get in front
of somebody else. So, if you allow anything less than two weeks you're really
probably going to be underprepared for the fit interview. In my overall
experience, the people who were good at cases got into the second round and
everybody in the second round was good at cases. The ones that went from the
second round to the offer were the ones who got A pluses on their fit interviews
because they were awesome and comfortable and great storytellers. So
hopefully you'll use this ultimate fit interview prep plan in order to do just
that for yourself. If you want more information, we've got a lot of content
in one of our materials, the Consulting Interview Bible, as well as at our
website at managementconsulted.com.